Leading the Reference Renaissance: Today's Ideas for Tomorrow's Cutting-Edge Services

Avant-garde thinkers, leading library practitioners, and well-known scholars share revelations and recommendations regarding innovative initiatives and evidence-based research results. You can immediately put these to use in informing your decisions to take the next steps forward.

Here, award-winning editor and reference visionary Marie L. Radford brings together a ground-breaking collection of successful reference models and practices from a variety of types of libraries, including all modes of virtual reference, collaborative ventures, and creative face-to-face service advances. Chapters in this persuasive work showcase reference librarians and researchers:

• Discussing current hot tech trends in reference such as using QR Codes (Quick Response), Web Conferencing, and more. • Determining best software adoption (including open source products) to get the longest life and most important service enhancements out of the newest technologies to meet the needs of our users. • Assessment and continual improvement of virtual and traditional services, including using statistical tracking software. • Outreach innovation and challenges including exploration of new service roles. • Collaborating on SMS, Text Messaging, Instant Messaging, and other emerging virtual technologies for reference use. • Developing easy-to-use roving reference techniques.

Shared strategies, proven research, and practical, live-from-the-field reports on the future of reference dynamically explore the latest and greatest innovations to keep reference relevant. In one convenient resource, this volume features authors who are leaders in studying user behavior, researching collaborative solutions to virtual reference that really work, and discovering applications for the ubiquitous mobile devices that now can be leveraged to deliver access to our collections and services to users for anywhere, anytime use.

Don’t get left behind… Leading the Reference Renaissance offers an inspirational look at reference that promotes use of our resources and services to more effectively meet users’ current and evolving needs!

Marie L. Radford

Marie L. Radford, Ph.D. is Professor in the Department of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University, NJ. An award-winning author, her latest books are Library Conversations: Reclaiming Interpersonal Communication Theory for Understanding Professional Encounters with Gary Radford (2017, ALA Editions) and Research Methods in Library and Information Science, Sixth Edition with Lynn S. Connaway (2017, Libraries Unlimited). She gives frequent keynote speeches and presentations at national and international library conferences and publishes extensively in prestigious LIS journals. She presents numerous workshops/webinars on topics that include: interpersonal communication in library contexts, service excellence, time management, managing change, conflict management, and positive approaches to problematic people. She is Co-PI of the “Seeking Synchronicity” (with Lynn Silipigni Connaway) and “Cyber Synergy” (with Lynn Silipigni Connaway and Chirag Shah) grant projects funded by IMLS, Rutgers, and OCLC. She received the 2010 ALA/RUSA Mudge Award for distinguished contributions to reference.